Was working with teachers today in a school during which time we were looking at lesson planning using the 5 minute lesson plan from @teachertoolkit. During the session I used my usual prompt for ideas as shown below:
Now a couple of teachers raised some issues with regards student behaviour and suggested that they had already exhausted their 26 available letters. My response to this was to suggest that as a group of teachers, together we may be able to share ideas. If each of us has 26 ideas, corresponding to the 26 letters in the alphabet, then there must be a high likelihood that as a group we will be able to collectively generate more than the 26 ideas which we can generate individually. It was at this point I realised that “if plan A doesn’t work” quote is only the first part of the process. The second part is if Plan A to Z fail, widen your pool of ideas. So at this point we seek the advice of our immediate colleagues for more ideas. I would suggest that this group of teachers would increase the available number of ideas however on reflection I would suggest that the increase would not be significant. All teachers in the group are most likely working in the same school and as such will have a shared perception of the issue at hand. As such they are likely to have approached the problem in similar manners meaning that the ideas generated will generally show high levels of similarity with only a small number of new ideas being generated by enlarging from an individual teacher to a group of teachers within the same school. Enlarging the group further to encompass local schools or teachers still within easy communication, or geographical distance would result in still further ideas however again if teachers are within the same national educational context, curriculum context, etc, there are likely to be shared perceptions which again will limit the ideas which will become apparent.
Enter twitter. Twitter allows teachers to contact and seek ideas from teachers across the world from totally different contexts. This means that there is a higher likelihood of original ideas which may not have been considered among the groups previously discussed. We have effectively widened our pool of ideas about as far as we can do. Now this advantage does not come without some disadvantages, namely those with polarised beliefs as to the “truth” and “fact”. Where people come from totally different contexts it is possible that one teachers “fact” may be another teachers “fiction”. Some tweeps are a little too forceful with their expressions as to their “fact”. This disadvantage, however, should be minimal as teachers are after all professionals and therefore should be able to have professional disagreements plus should be able to appreciate differing viewpoints and contexts which may exist.
Overall, twitter is not just about opening us up to more people and therefore more ideas, but about opening us up to ideas from totally different contexts. It opens us up to ideas we may not have been able to arrive at ourselves given the paradigm within which we operate. Access to these ideas may also in turn spark new ideas in us born out of the paradigm shift which may result from seeing a problem through a totally different viewpoint.
Technology and Learning